


March 22, 2233

by what_alchemy



Category: Star Trek (2009)
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Kid Fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-05-08
Updated: 2011-05-08
Packaged: 2017-10-19 04:07:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,508
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/196694
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/what_alchemy/pseuds/what_alchemy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Leonard McCoy is six and one-sixth years old when the <i>Kelvin</i> makes the newsfeeds.</p>
            </blockquote>





	March 22, 2233

Late March just outside Atlanta is a honey-sweet affair, the sun a grinning companion without the sickly humidity that’ll come soon as spring trickles into summer. It is not quite time to put away any jackets, but the only thing sure about the temperatures is that they’re capricious things sure to spike and dip by the whims of the gods alone. Outside smells like fresh-cut grass, honeysuckle and jasmine, and the cherry blossoms have begun to burst into bloom along the edges of the McCoy family property in riotous pinks and whites. Leonard, who has just turned six and one-sixth years old, is rambling in the lawn, his clothes mussed with dirt and grass stains, and he doesn’t notice that the sun shines so brightly that he has to squint. Lorna, his big sister, has just declared herself too sophisticated for the likes of him, and bounded off to find Miko down the corner of their street. Leonard is fairly certain that someday Lorna will marry Miko, and on that day, Leonard plans to put itching powder right in her unmentionables so she’ll wriggle and screech right in front of God and Nan and Miko’s scary great aunt Ms. Bertram and everyone Leonard knows. Lying on his belly inspecting the rich brown spaces between the blades of grass, Leonard snickers to himself. Lorna in a wedding dress! A great big puffy one she’d have to fumigate afterward just to get the powder off! Yessir, Leonard cannot wait for the big day. But in the meantime, he has to be patient, just like his momma keeps telling him.

So Leonard exercises his patience when a roly-poly — a big, fat one — lumbers out from the dirt. He places his hand down next to it and waits for it to makes its meandering way to his own grubby fingers, and it does. It’s a big old guy, but he still can’t feel its million little feet on his skin.

“Your name is Colonel Rollershins and you’re late for a meeting!” Leonard exclaims. “Mrs. Rollershins will be so mad!” He jostles his hand and prods at the Colonel with one of his other fingers and instantly his new friend is an impenetrable ball of exoskeleton. Leonard admires that; he wishes he could turn magically into a sphere whenever he wants, whenever Miko skips down the street and makes fun of his lisp and calls him a stupid baby and flicks him on the ear while Lorna laughs. Colonel Rollershins, in his ball, cannot be hurt. No big kid with a nasty smirk can get between the slats of his body to expose the tender shrimpy innards that must be inside, keeping him going. Miko tried that once - tried to crush a little roly-poly Leonard had named Lucy in the Dirt under the rubber soles of his tennis shoes while she was a ball, but Lucy in the Dirt was invincible, just like a tiny Superman of the underground, and she rolled away to safety where Miko couldn’t get her.

Miko caught one unawares once. Leonard had barely had time to name her when Miko came right out of the blue and stomped on her. She was squished there on the sidewalk, a tiny grey splatter like a burst bubble winked out of existence, and Leonard couldn’t help it — he began to cry. Miko and Lorna still haven’t let Leonard forget it, even though he was only five back then and he’s even grown a whole inch since the entire incident.

In his palm, Leonard takes a moment to pet the Colonel’s perfect spherical body. He wonders how far the Colonel would fly if he just flicked him as hard as he could, but if his mother has taught him patience, his daddy has taught him mercy, and gently Leonard sets the Colonel down.

“I guess you’ll just get there when you get there,” he whispers. He knows Colonel Rollershins, like all his kith and kin, will stay in his ball too long for Leonard to wait for him to unfurl and come play again. He will just find another, name it something new.

“These are woodlice,” Leonard remembers his daddy telling him once as they sat on the porch in the dusk. Some of the roly-polys had come out from between cracks in the concrete, and Leonard was little, still playing rough in those days. “And they look like bugs, Leonard, but they’re crustaceans, just like a shrimp or crab, and they never hurt anyone. So we don’t hurt them either, y’hear?” Leonard had nodded solemnly and his daddy had squeezed him a little and pressed a kiss into his hair. They’d rocked in the swing together, watching the stars in the purpling twilight until Momma called them back in with a warning about the chill.

Colonel Rollershins is off and Leonard goes rooting around in some other patch of lawn to look for someone else when he hears his momma call his name, the timbre of her voice increasingly frantic. Leonard pops to his feet and runs back to the plantation house, and his momma, with her severe eyebrows and thin, pursed mouth, levels a hard look at him and puts her hands on her hips when she sees him.

“Leonard McCoy, you are a mess,” she says. “Get in here.” Her words are sharp but her hand on his head is a soft, warm weight, and he likes it when she cards through his hair. She sticks her hands under his armpits suddenly and swings him up into her arms to bury her face in his neck. “I love you,” she says gruffly, and it’s not that she never says it, but she’s told him it’s only for special occasions, so that the power of the meaning never leaves the words through overuse. But she says it again: “I love you.”

“Momma,” is all he can say in answer. She’s squeezing him too hard; he can feel his ribs grind together, and he squeaks a little, but over her shoulder he can see the newsfeeds on the holovision screen. There was a battle in space, as far as he can tell, and a great big starship — _Romulan_ , someone says, and Leonard doesn’t know that word — took on just a little one from the Federation, and lost, just like David and Goliath. But it seems like everyone lost, and Leonard, who has never so much been interested in games of cops and robbers, can’t fathom a winning team with so many — what was that word? — casualties. _Kelvin_ he hears, and _Acting Captain George Kirk_ , and he’s gasping for breath until his momma unlocks her arms and pulls him far enough away from her warm body to lay dozens of kisses on his face.

“It’s one of those days you remember for the rest of your life, Leonard,” she says, voice thick. He can see tears glistening on the edges of her dark eyelashes. “I’m sorry it can’t be a happy one.”

She keeps him close for the rest of the day. She even calls up Miko’s great aunt and has her send Lorna back home. She’s no master chef, as Daddy likes to say with a grin, but she makes them burnt little oblong discs she calls lady fingers and even Lorna makes no complaint when they eat them quietly with glasses of milk, the newsfeed playing in the background. None of it makes sense to Leonard, especially the angry, red-faced men who come on the screen and say things about declaring war against hostile, barbaric aliens. “Every Romulan needs to pay,” Leonard hears one of them snarl, and here Momma turns the volume down.

“Now you know that’s just nonsense, don’t you?” she asks. Beside him, Lorna gives a sullen nod and holds just one end of her lady finger in her milk with a put-upon sigh. She’s the type who likes her cereal soggy, too, and Momma’s cookies have a long way to go. “Leonard?” Momma asks. “You know what that man says is nonsense, right? That you can’t hold an entire race responsible for the actions of one man?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Leonard says.

“Good, good,” Momma says with a distracted nod, and she gets up to do some cleaning up. She never turns the volume back up, but the station plays some of the recorded footage from escaping shuttle pods over and over again on a loop: the destruction of the _Kelvin_ in fuzzy, dizzying pixelation, colors washed until only bursts of white explode across the screen. They hurt Leonard’s eyes.

Leonard’s daddy will come home from work tonight and swoop him and Lorna up for kisses. Maybe he and Momma and Lorna and Leonard will all go sit out on the swing and watch the sky as if there’s any hope of seeing what’s left of what happened out there in the black. Maybe they will pray together. Maybe a roly-poly will march out from a crack in the concrete, and Leonard will give it a name.

**Author's Note:**

> I took all birthdates from [Memory Alpha.](http://memory-alpha.org/wiki/Portal:Main) I tried my best to get the dialectic term for "woodlouse" for Georgia from [this map of different words for woodlice across the US](http://classic-web.archive.org/web/20060903212243/http://cfprod01.imt.uwm.edu/Dept/FLL/linguistics/dialect/staticmaps/q_74.html) (how specific can something get?). In my neck of the woods we call them potato bugs.


End file.
